Each night, twelve-year-old me calls current me on the landline that’s been unplugged since I don't know when, and some nights I let it ring and ring while other nights I slowly answer, hold my breath against the receiver, and slowly hang it back up, and still some nights I get some courage, reach out my voice, but it only ever echoes back, and when I don’t speak, he fills the void with questions I can’t—or don’t—answer, though most are silly (asking if I ever made it to the majors), others less so (wondering if I ever told mom what I did that summer or if I still love the people I once loved), and sometimes he asks if I’m happy even if I don’t know how to begin to explain, but I wouldn’t call what this is talking—it’s more one voice, then the other, then silence—and when I speak, my old voice repeats, and when I don’t, my young voice haunts the line even if I’m not sure he hears me exhaling on this side, and I think about how I haven't been twelve for so long or if anyone else hears us, though I tell no one about these calls since I can’t tell if—like some old trope—they’re coming from inside the house (or whatever that metaphorically means), but I still wonder where else they would be coming from and where else I should be now and where else I had been then and who else I was, am, or will be, and when I try to call back deep in desperate hours of late nights to try to get through, all I ever get is a dial tone so loud it starts to sound like my own scream.
Aaron Sandberg has appeared or is forthcoming in Asimov’s, No Contact, Alien Magazine, The Shore, The Offing, Sporklet, Right Hand Pointing, Halfway Down the Stairs, Crow & Cross Keys, Burningword Journal, Whale Road Review, and elsewhere. A multiple Pushcart and Best of the Net nominee, you can see him—and his poetry posts—on Instagram @aarondsandberg.